Key Takeaways from 5 PPC and SEO Trends

Last week gShift and Acquisio joined forces to present a 5 PPC and SEO Trends webinar, attended by more than 700 marketers. The aim of the presentation was to help both SEO and PPC professionals get a better understanding of current trends and incorporate them across their SEO and PPC strategies.

Of the 5 trends included in the webinar, here are the key takeaways for digital marketers.

Making Changes to Mobile

As Krista LaRiviere, co-founder and CEO of gShift, put it, there are two truths related to mobile marketing:

1) Your brand and content are discovered differently when someone searches on a desktop device or a mobile device
2) You’re likely unaware of what those differences are

To understand the differences, look at analytics at a keyword level for both mobile and desktop devices. You will notice the same keywords have different ranking on different devices.

Because mobile users pay for data, as Chris Doran, VP Marketing at Acquisio explained, every mobile search counts and people are much more direct with their searches – they have more of an immediate need. That means you should adjust which keywords you target, adjusting bids for local searches and more direct terms, to best respond to this mobile need.

Consider Voice

Keywords are changing because of the integration of new search methods. One of the most common, yet important changes is voice-based search. A study from Google concluded everyone, across all age groups, has used voice search at least once. If more people are using voice search on mobile devices, rather than searching “flower store Honolulu” someone would say “I’m looking for a flower store in Honolulu,” these small differences will affect the keywords you bid on or the content you create with PPC and SEO and even change the top results for each respective search.

Hope onboard the Native Ads train

Right now, native ads offer high ROA for marketers, so the appeal is huge for advertisers. But as Chris said, “We need to be responsible as marketers, to make sure we provide ads, which integrate seamlessly into the online experience or else ultimately we won’t continue seeing the high performance or ROI most advertisers see now.”

One way to ensure your Native Ad will be effective is to use SEO content, Krista suggested. People don’t typically connect native ads and SEO, but you can’t do SEO or Native Ads without strong content. If you see posted content is doing well organically, you can use the post content as a Native Ad, so your SEO content doubles as a paid piece of content to attract more eyeballs to your website. SEO strategy should help inform and drive Native Ad Campaigns.

Video Ads are the Answer

Video Ads are the new hot topic for agencies and advertisers in 2015 and it’s clear why. Krista conducted an experiment to see how quickly a Video Ad can be indexed on Google. Once a video was uploaded to YouTube, she showed it could be indexed and discovered within 15 minutes! That opportunity is too big to miss for advertisers.

Looking towards paid advertising, video ads can be used across multiple formats including native advertising and to help build up cross-channel promotion. Video offers marketers a method to create an engaging cross-channel story for their target audience(s). Vlogs, for example, are a great way of sharing information in a secondary format to draw in more attention.

People want to watch videos, particularly on mobile, where reading is less than ideal due to screen size and scrolling. Therefore, not only will video content help optimize your message for mobile, it will help index your content on Google.

Final Takeaway

The biggest trend, according to Krista LaRiviere, is lines are continuing to blur between the traditional pillars of marketing – paid, owned and earned – but at the center of all of those pillars is content.

A strong content marketing strategy incorporating the main trends (including mobile, voice, native ads and video ads) and promoted by paid techniques (search ads), owned techniques (content on your or off youe own website) and earned techniques (SEO, social and email marketing) is key to engaging audiences effectively.

When all of these techniques and trends come together with relevant content, you will achieve the highest ROAS.